Radio
Voices of the people
Michael Vestey
Abook about the history of the tape- recorder is, on the face of it, not an entic- ing prospect, even to those of us who've used such machines over the years. One thinks immediately of other potential tomes, The Byte of Tndh, The Changing Rivet or The Evolution of the Railway Sleep- er. To the technically minded, such works would be of interest, no doubt, and I apolo- gise to any authors who have actually pro- duced books with these titles as I have just made them up. A student from North America wrote to me some time ago asking if I could help him research his thesis which he was turn- ing into a book. It was to be entitled A His- tory of the Tape-Recorder. My first reaction was a disbelieving snigger followed by irri- tation that he'd thought I had enough spare time to do his research for him. I ignored it. But when you think about it, as I have had to do this week, there might be something in it, though such a book would have to have a more snazzy title; something like The Power of Babel to attract cus- tomers in bookshops. It could even be called I Tape, Therefore I Am, from Studs Terkel's portentous description of himself in his weekly radio series on Radio Four (Friday) which ended this week. I think our North American reader might have something as the tape-recorder has had a huge impact on broadcasting. In The Rise of the Common Voice on Radio Four (Saturday), part of the BBC's 75th anniver- sary, Andy Kershaw explored how the BBC's attitude to the public has changed since 1922 when broadcasting began at Savoy Hill; everything from early pro- grammes involving listeners to what he called the modern lawn-in'. He meant, of course, phone-in, though his northern mis- pronunciation somehow seemed more apt.
Kershaw and one of his contributors, a social historian, seemed obsessed by class, thinking that the BBC's founder, Lord Reith, had a snobbish disdain for the public appearing on the radio. Perhaps Reith did, though I doubt it; he was, after all, a Scot, a non-graduate son of the manse, not an establishment grandee by birth, though he might have wanted to be. He preferred pundits, experts, the great and the good, and so on, but one has to put this in the context of the time. For the fledgling radio service to survive, it needed to convince the governments of the time that broadcasting was necessary. Many powerful people couldn't see the point of it or saw it as a threat. When so-called ordinary people did begin appearing they were interviewed in private, their words were scripted and they then read their scripts in the studio.
Although this practice continued through the Fifties I suspect it was more to do with a fear that people who weren't used to talk- ing in public would make poor radio. There's some truth in this even today when people show a greater readiness to express their opinion on radio and television. A caller to Any Answers on Radio Four (Sat- urday), responding to the special anniver- sary edition of Any Questions about the future of the BBC, thought that in recent years the Corporation had undermined the social fabric of Britain but she couldn't articulate how. I think I knew what she meant but she couldn't get her brain to work and she failed to make her point, despite Jonathan Dimbleby's prompting. It's something you hear on many phone- ins.
As Kershaw and his producer, Jeanette Thomas, revealed, it took communist pro- ducers to put working men and women on the air in the 1930s from BBC Manchester. They set about making programmes about the northern working class and the heavy industries for which they worked. They cre- ated patronising characters like Harry Hopeful who would interview the workers in front of a studio audience, the first attempts to move the BBC closer to the masses. One of their programmes, The Classic Soil (how Messrs Peter Cook and Sellars would have liked that), was inspired by the works of Friedrich Engels. The pro- cess took off with the invention of the EMI midget, a portable but by no means light tape-recorder with which producers and reporters were able to venture forth to cap- ture views on tape.
By the time I joined the BBC, in 1970, the German uher was being used, and still is. One of the great pleasures of leaving the Corporation was never having to carry one of these again. Although technically excel- lent they're cumbersome, and there's been a move towards lighter cassette recorders. My first exercise in the vox pop was on a training course. Our instructor told us to go down Regent Street and ask people the question: should Edward Heath (the then prime minister) be off on his yacht or back home running the country. As it was August, it struck me that his yacht was the best place for him, but I was so embar- rassed by the idiocy of the question that I spent an hour in Liberty's doorway trying to pluck up the courage to approach passers-by. And when I did, some said, `This isn't another training course, is it?'
Since the broadcasters have been able to go to the people in search of the common voice, so the people have come to domi- nate the airwaves. It's possible that the man who wants to write a history of the tape-recorder might have something to say, after all.
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